The Mixtecan languages constitute a branch of the Oto-Manguean language family of

Mexico Mexico (Spanish language, Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a List of sovereign states, country in the southern portion of North America. It is borders of Mexico, bordered to the north by the United States; to the so ...

. They include the Trique (or Triqui) languages, spoken by about 24,500 people; Cuicatec, spoken by about 15,000 people; and the large expanse of Mixtec languages, spoken by about 511,000 people. The relationship between Trique, Cuicatec, and Mixtec, is an open question. Unpublished research by

Terrence Kaufman Terrence Kaufman (1937 – March 3, 2022) was an American linguist specializing in documentation of unwritten languages, lexicography, Mesoamerican historical linguistics and language contact phenomena. He was an emeritus professor of linguisti ...

in the 1980s supported grouping Cuicatec and Mixtec together.

Proto-Mixtecan

The ''

urheimat In historical linguistics, the homeland or ''Urheimat'' (, from German '' ur-'' "original" and ''Heimat'', home) of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages. A proto-language is the r ...

'' of the Oto-Manguean family may be the valley of

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Puebla Puebla ( en, colony, settlement), officially Free and Sovereign State of Puebla ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Puebla), is one of the 32 states which comprise the Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 217 municipalities and its cap ...

state. This site was one of the places of the domestication of

maize Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American English, North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples of Mexico, indigenous ...

. The thousand-year presence of Oto-Manguean-speaking groups in this region makes it probable that they were active in this domestication process, which favored the inhabitants of the Altiplano's transition to a sedentary lifestyle and thus influenced the development of Mesoamerican civilization. Campbell and Kaufman have proposed that the Oto-Manguean languages began to diverge about 1500 BCE. The difficulty of establishing more general relationships between the eight subgroups of the family presents a difficulty for making more detailed inferences on the historical development of the languages. Proto-Oto-Manguean has been reconstructed by

Robert E. Longacre Robert E. Longacre (August 13, 1922–April 20, 2014) was an American linguist and missionary who worked on the Triqui language and a text-based theory and method of discourse analysis. He is well known for his seminal studies of discourse ...

and Calvin Rensch. The phonological system of the proto-language has nine consonants, four vowels, and four tones. The groups of consonants and the diphthongs formed from this limited repertory would have been the origin of the phonemes in the daughter proto-languages of the various subgroups of Proto-Oto-Manguean. Some of the most significant changes in the diversification of Proto-Oto-Manguean phonemes into Proto-Mixtecan phonemes are the following: Rensch revised the reconstruction work of Longacre. He revised the probable phonological inventory and described some of his proposals, based on comparisons of the cognates in the Mixtecan languages. After this work, he proposed a reconstruction of the phonological system of Proto-Mixtecan. This proposal contains sixteen consonants, four vowels, and four tones. Longacre (1957) had reconstructed the following consonant inventory for Proto-Mixtecan:Silverman, 1993, p. 109

References

* Longacre, Robert E. 1957. Proto-Mixtecan. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 23(4):1-195.

Proto-Mixtecan

References

Further reading

See also